Christopher Lawrence

It’s starting to feel like losing a friend. A friend who shot a fellow cop in the face, tortured and killed suspects, put seized drugs back on the streets he patrolled and started a bloody war between a Mexican cartel and the Armenian mob just to help cover his tracks, but a friend nonetheless.

Whenever cable series come to town, they usually gloss over everything not included in the Vegas Variety Pack: a buffet, some showgirls, a wedding chapel Elvis impersonator and a bachelorette party complete with matching Ed Hardy T-shirts and lower-back tattoos.

I’ve never been much good at denying my urges — the low point being my set of commemorative plates commemorating the first set of commemorative plates — but I live like a monk compared to Dexter Morgan and Hank Moody.

Neither can lay claim to the title of the scariest thing on TV — after a couple of minutes of CNBC’s stock ticker, I spent the other day hiding under my bed — but nobody does spooky quite like “Fringe” (9 p.m. Tuesdays, KVVU-TV, Channel 5) and “Supernatural” (9 p.m. Thursdays, KVCW-TV, Channel 33).

Over the years, it’s been pretty easy to marginalize the fantasy genre. After all, aside from the occasional Hollywood blockbuster, the closest the sword-and-sorcery set usually gets to the mainstream is the songs of Ronnie James Dio and the murals on the sides of custom vans.

If there’s one thing wrong with TV — other than the fact that there’s still not a Tina Fey Channel — it’s this: My attention span has been obliterated. Seriously, sometimes I’ll just trail off in the middle of a …

You may not guess it from looking at me, but I’m not that interested in food. Especially not on TV, where the Food Network seems to be all about cuisine this and fusion that. (For the record, the only cuisine I’ve eaten had the word “lean” in front of it, and the closest I get to fusion is ordering fries with my quesadilla at Del Taco.)

This being premiere week, there’s a lot of information to get to. So I won’t waste any time before sharing the 10 things you should know about the new fall season.